Sport – in itself and in the world: an epilogue

Although I do not remember now how far back in time I first wrote about sports in this column, I do remember the surprise that it generated among many readers. One particular reader I shall identify by name since he is a younger friend and also a dedicated reader of this column. He is Wumi Raji, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at OAU, Ife. Upon reading that first column on sports, he immediately sent me an email expressing his great relief to see that apart from reading, writing and worrying endlessly about the state of affairs in our country and our world, I still found time to watch and apparently enjoy sports, specifically tennis. Something similar happened these past two weeks when I have been writing about the US 2018 Open women’s singles final. This time around, people who wrote me did not exactly show surprise that I had written about a sporting event; rather, what many stated was how surprised they were to read and encounter the minutiae and details of tennis history and personalities in what I had written about the US Open. This idea is what prompts me to write this epilogue to the pieces that appeared in this column in the last two weeks.

It is a mistaken idea to think that only professional sports journalists and columnists should either write about sport and/or show an interest in the history and the other myriad of things peculiar to sport. In the first instance, as we all know, people, “ordinary” women and men, talk a lot about sports. Not only that, they make it their business to know what is going on, or what is not going on in sports. In this respect, it is safe to say that there are literally hundreds of thousands, even millions upon millions of sports commentators or “specialists” in this world. Indeed, comparing Nigeria with the United States, I would argue that there are far more self-made and self-certified sports commentators and analysts in Nigeria than in America. In my neighborhood at Oke-Bola in Ibadan, I hear many more commentaries on sports in the street and the roadside shops than the zero number of times that I have heard similar sports comments and analyses in the neighborhood where I live and work in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Moreover, the number of people in Nigeria that call in to participate in radio programmes on sports, especially football, is astounding, as I have found when I find the time – and the inclination – to listen to or “eavesdrop” on the conversations in these radio broadcasts.

Surprise, surprise: the people, the workers, the small or minuscule scale entrepreneurs, the hawkers and vendors, the unemployed and the so-called “unemployables”, they all show and express as much interest in sports as they do about politics and the (terrible) state of affairs in the nation and the world! If that is the case, what is the explanation for this fact? Let us not fail to see the answer to this question that stands as openly revealed as sunlight on a cloudless day: the significance, the fascination of sport is in sport itself. Yes, people often link nationalism, patriotism, ethnic or racial pride and passionate interest in a local team with whatever it is that makes sport significant in its own right. However, ultimately such sentiments are based on something inherent in sport that makes it possible and perhaps necessary to foist so many extraneous things on it. That something is compounded of the combination of talent, skill, creativity and genius that we find in spor in a manner in which we do not find them in virtually all other spheres of life – politics, trade and commerce, warfare, science and technology and even professions like teaching and religious pastorate.

Since an uncountable number of books, monographs and articles have been written on the significance of sports as sports, we do not need to dwell too long on the subject in this essay. In this context, it is enough, I think, to remind the reader that in the considered opinion of many philosophers, thinkers and pundits, the inherent significance of sports lies in the fact that all the things that we admire and cherish in it all constitute ends in themselves, without a need to be justified by how much value it generates in quantifiable terms. Think of soldering, teaching, trading, engineering, manufacturing, fashion and design, thieving and looting: the skill, the creativity, the genius we find in them are all calculated in measurable terms, in value added production. In sports only is the question of value added secondary to value that is inherent, immanent in sport itself. But that is not the end of the story! This observation leads us to the second part of this piece, this being sport not only in itself but in the world, powerfully and complexly.

For those among the readers of this piece who might have detected echoes of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s distinction between Being-in-itself and Being-in-the world or Being-with-the-other, I confess that I do have that Heideggerian distinction in mind in writing this piece. However, since this is not a professorial lecture but a newspaper column, rather than give a lengthy and largely unnecessary explanation, let me simply say that the pertinence of these ideas and concepts from Heidegger lies in his insistence that while Being-in-itself cannot and does not stand alone but is intimately and ultimately linked with Being-in-the-world, we must nonetheless give Being-in-itself its due acknowledgment and significance. In plain language, this means that for us to understand the powerful economic, commercial and political forces that we often find at the centre of the organization of sports in our epoch, we must first give sport its due as being inherently and immanently self-justifying. To give concrete expression to this abstract idea, permit me to go back to some aspects of what I wrote in this column in the preceding two weeks.

One of those who wrote to me on those pieces in this column in the last two weeks said dramatically, “I never knew that you were a fan of the Williams sisters!”. Yes, I am a fan of Venus and Serena because it is a great pleasure to watch them play, especially when they are at their best. With Serena especially, when she is serving well – and she has been almost universally adjudged to be the best server in tennis history, male and female – every other aspect of her game is in full steam – her pace and power, her movement, her shot selection and her crosscourt ground strokes. And at such moments when she is playing with the full panoply of her skills and talent, she even comes to the net a lot, something that is ordinarily not part of her armory. Beyond Serena, there are many other female and male players of the past and the present that I admire greatly and loved/love to watch – Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Martina Navratilova, Roger Federer, Yanick Noah, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Justine Henin, Nick Kyrgios and many others. This is all strictly and exclusively with regard to their skills and talents as tennis players. But beyond that and with regard to their off-court lives and affairs, it is a different matter altogether. For instance, the day that I found out that Sampras was a Florida Republican, he fell out of favor completely as far as I was concerned! This, in spite of the fact that I have not read anything to indicate that he is in the right-wing, covertly or openly racist wing of the Republican party. What I do know, what his being Republican indicated to me was an explanation for why he was so apolitical, why he seemed not to care much about all the issues of gender equality and racial and ethnic diversity that were going on in tennis when he was the undisputed superstar and grand icon of the sport. I did not stop enjoying watching him play when I made this discovery; but neither did I remain content to separate his prowess on the court from his conservatism in politics.

In the two pieces to which this essay is a prologue, I focused much, if not exclusively, on the politics of class, race and gender in competitive tennis. If my intention in those two initiating pieces had been to cover all the major external forces acting on tennis, I would also have written about branding commercialism and the capitalist profit drive as inextricable dimensions of race and gender in tennis. This is because, at the present time and beginning with the transition to the Open Era, tennis has become more and more driven by monumental capital flows across the whole planet in ways that were unimaginable before the inception of the Open Era. Of all the individual sports in comparison with team sports, tennis stands alone as the one sport that can compete with the gaudy emporiums of the likes of Hollywood, the global music industry and the fashion and cosmetics industry. Like all these other formations of global capitalist trade in brands, tennis has an internal class and status differentiation that hides the depth of impoverishment behind and underneath the most visible and successful brands. That, for me, is the most important dimension of the Being-in-the-world of global competitive tennis. You hear of the Williams sisters, of RF (Roger Federer), of Rafa, of Djokovic and about a dozen or so other superstars, other brands. You hardly ever hear of the thousands in professional tennis who live, quite literally, from hand to mouth.

I am a fan of the Williams sisters because they have always sought to bring together the Being-in-itself of tennis with its Being-in-the-world. That’s partly because they came from Compton and have never forgotten from whence they came. That’s also partly because their father, the visionary Richard Williams, rigorously prepared them to be both outstanding tennis players and be ready for the racism, the sexism and the class and status paternalism they would face in tennis. Venus especially has been the leading voice for gender equality in the sport among the current generation of active players. And in her activism, she has combined an acute intelligence with gritty determination and uncommon grace. Serena has not been silent but has been more focused on the game itself, on her matchless skills and talents. Of recent, she has been showing more off-court advocacy for egalitarian issues. I think she has been hit by the revelation that becoming the GOAT has opened up for her a moral and political agency that she did not know that she has always had, for at least the last decade and half.

I look at Naomi Osaka, who has twice now defeated Serena, her childhood idol, the one person above all other tennis players from whom she derived the greatest inspiration to become a tennis player. I confidently expect that she will also become, like Serena and Venus, a multiple grand slam champion. But will she, like the Williams sisters, bring tennis-in-itself into cross-fertilization with tennis-in-the-world? She will not be in want of the circumstances and the motivation for this because she is half Black and half Japanese and plays under the flag of a country in which interracial biological and cultural heritage still faces great denial and prejudice.